After partition, Pakistan continues to wage a proxy war with India with Kashmir being the hub of its activities. While the administration in Kashmir is Indian, the local populace are by and large Pakistani sympathisers.
A similar scenario is being witnessed down South. Post bifurcation, seven mandals of Telangana , including Chintoor, Kunavaram, Burgumpadu, Veerulapadu, Kukkanur, Vara Ramachanrapuram and Bhadrachalam, except Bhadrachalam town, were merged in East and West Godavari districts of Andhra Pradesh but the residents of the merged mandals are still not ready to accept the Andhra administration.
Taking advantage of this, the Naxalites are in touch with old party sympathisers and militia members to revive the movement in East Godavari, sources said.
The Telangana higher officials are also rumored to be instigating the locals asking them not to co-operate with the Andhra people at any cost. This could prove to be costly for AP especially in combating Naxalism.
The Telangana cops are in the process of handing over the entire police stations to their Andhra counterparts and have already removed all records and weapons from the stations. But more importantly, they are absolutely refusing to share any intelliegence inputs with the Andhra cops.
“Around four companies of para military forces will support the local cops in dealing with the Maoist menace apart from anti-naxal squads.But the entire terrain is new to our cops and they will take time to adjust. We need to collect inputs on Maoists from that particular area ourselves as the Telangana cops are not keen on disclosing their sources or informers to Andhra cops. So we will have to build our own intelligence network ground up in these Maoist strong holds,” said an official involved in the anti-naxal operations.
The ball is now in the court of Chandrababu Naidu. Either he lets the situation stagnate that results in an anti-AP zone similar to Kashmir or he takes firm and decisive action that will bring stability and peace to the seven Mandals even though it might be at the expense of some tough some short-term measures.
